Hospitals are filling up and frontline healthcare workers are pushed to their limits. Here’s how we can help them.

Here’s a flashback to the original spring surge.

Full transcript below!

Hi everyone, Dr. Z. Okay, frontline healthcare workers during the surge. People are exhausted. Nurses are absolutely stretched. I remember hearing a news report in there and the guy was like, “well, we’re doing okay here in Utah. “It’s just the nurses went from three to one to four to one,” which means they’re really at six to one or eight to one ’cause I know how that goes. I know our front lines are getting stretched thin, especially in places that are surging right now. Doctors are exhausted, nurses are exhausted, RTs are exhausted, so what can we do?

Here’s what I advocate and this is really important. When you’re trying to take care of a surge in COVID patients, because they’re filling your ICU, the number one limiting factor, apart from PPE and all that, which we’re hoping we have a handle on right, is staffing. You can take care of a lot more patients more efficiently if you get rid of all the BS that doesn’t actually help patient care.

So how about this? Let me propose this, a moratorium on having to chart bull crap. All right. Let’s just get rid of it. So no more clicking the boxes, just write a summary note every day that says here’s where the patient is, this is what we’re planning to do, this is what we think is happening. Basically the gestalt of how to care for that patient and get the other crap out of it.

Now to do that, that means we don’t have to practice CYA, “cover your ass” medicine, which means we’d better have a moratorium on malpractice for COVID patients, period, for everybody, for all the people taking care of that patient because if you take that off the table, you know what will happen is everyone will get amazing care because, instead of treating the computer, treating the number, or treating the damn lawyer, what we’ll be doing is treating the patient, your mom or your brother or your son and it will absolutely revolutionize our ability to care for them at a time when we’re stretched so thin.

Get rid of all that stuff. Just make it easy for us to care for patients and give us the PPE that we need to do it safely because if we’re sick and now they’re having nurses come in who’ve tested positive, if you’re asymptomatic, throw a mask on and come to work. That is a sign of desperation at that point. When that’s happening, that means we are filling up, which means we need these other– We will spend trillions of dollars of national treasure throwing it at corporations and we won’t tell doctors and nurses you don’t have to chart, you won’t get sued. Here’s some PPE. They’re the only people who matter for caring for these patients and we won’t do that. Let’s do that.

Okay, whoever’s coming into office Biden, Harris, I don’t care who it is, do that for us now and then this is for the front lines. I know it’s exhausting. I trained in the time before there were work hour we would take call for 36 hours. I would hallucinate things were crawling on me. It was not good, but we could do it for a period of time if we knew there was an end point. We were called to do this job. We could do it. We could pull ourselves together. We could stop really feeling so fragile. We’re much stronger than we think and we could do it, but we need help. We need a team. We need the administrators to back us on this no charting, no malpractice BS and, again, with that support of the team, with the new research and technology and everything from dexamethasone, Remdesivir , whatever it is, we can save lives. We were called to do this. This is the highest calling and if we’re allowed to do it, we will come out of this looking back and go. his was the time of our lives when everything we did mattered.

So that’s all I have to say guys. Please, please share this video everywhere so that people can hear what we need. If you have an idea of how to make it better, if you’re on the front lines, leave it in the comments, share the video, join our Supporter Tribes, subscribe on all the platforms because it grows our movement and we are out.

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